The results from ICANN's vote to extend the available top-level domains are in and the decision was unanimously approved. As well as allowing for the creation of new domains the vote has also approved the creation of domains with non-ASCII characters allowing for Russian, Arabic and other non-English names.There's already been a lot of discussion about the ramifications of such a large change to the organisation of the net. The creation of new top-level domains could open up the market and allow for domains that have already been taken under .com, .net etc to become available under a new top-level. This would mean that, for example, while bigmouthmedia.com is already taken bigmouthmedia.bmm would be available. Many trademark holders have already invested in buying as many of the domains related to them as they can and the introduction of new custom top-level domains will mean that they have to purchase many more if they wish to protect their brand. With the costs to acquire a new top-level expected to run into the hundreds of thousands of pounds, this could prove an expensive task.
However, the provision to allow for non-ASCII characters is an important one in making the net a truly international affair. As well as allowing for the creation of addresses in Russian and Arabic it also allows domains in english to make use of unusual characters - although entering them on a UK keyboard may prove problematic.
By opening up net address, ICANN has opened a veritable treasure chest; the predicted price for a TLD could easily reach 100k, excluding the technical and ongoing maintenance costs. This will certainly deter many cybersquatters, although it may also deter many small companies or individuals interested in creating a more personalized web site.
There are many SEO ramifications for such a move - on both sides of the equation. Websites trying to raise their SEO profile by buying property in a relevant and reputably good TLD will be affected as will search engines trying to determine which TLDs contain sites of high quality. We can anticipate many algorithmic changes to the crawling and indexing process will surfacing over the next year to take into new issues into consideration such as:
- The geotargeting of a TLD, currently many search engines depend on TLDs and signals from the website to determine the relevant geographical targeting of a website, now with TLDs opening up, geotargeting will be much harder to infer, with more weight placed on signals within the build or the content of the site, or perhaps the engines will follow Google's footsteps, placing a geotargeting option within their webmasters consoles.
- SEO value migration is also subject to interest for this move, if Supermarket1 decided to buy the .Supermarket1 TLD, will this mean that a migration from shop.Supermarket1.com to shop.Supermarket1 will transfer all the associated value with the first address to the second address successfully? What would happen to the long term value buildup? Will shop.Supermarket1.com progress faster in the engines than shop.Supermarket1? All these factors will have to be taken into consideration and researched carefully before any migration takes place and strategies could emerge specifically for migrating into a new top-level domain.
This is a massive change to the organisation of the net and ICANN have stated that they are working to accept applications in the second quarter of 2009 - when we can expect to see the changing face of domain names in action, and in our URLs.
